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Starting here, building a nas, need advice


littlegreenjeep

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The TL;DR is at the bottom.

Ok, so as the title suggests, I'm building a nas. I'm suffering from a bit of analysis paralysis and need some help... 

 

I'm moving from a Synology ds415+ w/2x6tb and 2x2tb drives using SHR (~10tb usable, ~7 in use). I'm moving to a supermicro server with 2x8core xeon procs, 64g of ram and 10 drive bays (2 static, 8 hot swap).

 

My plan is to load Xenserver on the server, then have a vm of a nas that has ownership of the 8 swap bays. From there the nas will share out to any additional guest vm's on the xen. The goal is to have a beefier plex server (currently not on synology) that can handle multiple 4k transcodes, separate the workload from the synology for sabnzb, radarr, sonarr, etc, and run dedicated vm's for wordpress/websites as well as a pfsense box. Storage will be NAS only, the vm disks will live on the 2 static drives in a mdadm raid1. 

 

Xenserver is up and running with a couple of vm's, but the nas has been the question I can't answer. My plan originally was to run xpenology because I wanted to continue using all the nifty tools (DS Cam to access Surveillance Station, Cloud Station, etc) and because I could in theory just pull the 4 drives out of the syn, move to the xpenology and pretend nothing happened. I have since learned the synology tools are not really an option with xpenology, at least not without some questionable antics and a little more work under the hood than I desire. I'm very comfortable with the work, but honestly I do sysad work for a living and just want to go home and watch plex without having to tinker on a regular basis.

 

I have looked at FreeNAS, I work on Solaris at work so very comfortable with ZFS, but the mismatched drives present issues. I can do different stuff like mirrored vdevs or I have 4 additional 2tb drives I could add and make a couple of raidz1 vdevs, but with ZFS I have to increase all the drives in a vdev to increase the size of it, so depending on how I lay the first brick the whole system is pretty hard to change. I have debated unraid but I just don't have warm fuzzies looking at it. I've looked at rockstor, but the fact their page point blank says if you value your data, don't trust it to them makes me leery there. There's all the mergerfs/snapraid/drivepool/I forget what else... but we get back to, I'd really like to just not having to think about computers when I get home... I have really enjoyed synology's gui and would really love to run it on bigger hardware.

 

TL;DR:

So I'm back to thinking about xpenology and offloading the tools I currently use. A linux vm running zoneminder for cameras, ownCloud/similar for cloud station.

My questions: how stable is xpenology?

Does it handle adding drives/upgrading drives as easily/smoothly as traditional synology?

Can I change from SHR to SHR2 on the fly when I add more drives? 

Does anyone have any experience running it as a vm and is it stable there?

Does Hyperbackup work the same, as in does it violate anything like adding cameras to SS? Currently use HB to a usb 8tb, hope to get another cloud solution working soon (thanks crashplan...)

Any other questions I'm missing/should be asking? 

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  • 1 month later...

I'm pretty new to xpenology but it seems like it should work just like the original with two major exceptions:

 

1) no regular / stable updates.  Once you have installed the version, you're stuck with it for a while until a stable xpenology update comes out, which seems like a long while after the official update was released.

 

2) certain tools don't work due to license.  The only one that I am aware of are Quick Connect because it goes through Synology's servers. If there are other tools that also goes through synology's server then they would also violate some licensing terms.

 

As for cameras, I believe there should be no problems with adding camera licenses to xpenology.

Edited by kilimar
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